Adam Pally Predicts the Future of TV Comedy

Adam Pally, once the star of Happy Endings and then The Mindy Project, now claims to be out of work—his character on Mindy left to run off to Texas and get married. But, in fact, Pally is busy doing a lot of things: developing digital-focused comedy for ABC, popping up in studio comedies, and, in his words, finding out what it’s like to play the guy who gets the girl.

That’s what happens in his Tribeca Film Festival comedy, Slow Learners, though it’s a circuitous route getting there: he and fellow U.C.B. alum Sarah Burns play two self-described boring people who decide, over the course of one summer, to see what it’s like to become cool. He puts on a leather jacket and quits his book club, she learns how to flirt, and the two of them spend the summer sleeping with a lot of people . . . while, naturally, inevitably gravitating back toward each other.

“This character, when it came to me, he was low status and kind of dorky, and I don’t get to play that that much,” Pally said, speaking as the festival was in full swing. “I just had this vision of this guy who was just kind of happy. He didn’t need a better shirt, he didn’t need a better apartment, he liked what he had until he realized that he didn’t.” Pally describes himself, on the other hand, as essentially the opposite. “There are people who feel content. I don’t, ever.”

But in that search for ever-elusive contentment, Pally has stumbled across some pretty spectacular things, from the genuinely landmark role of gay bro Max on Happy Endings to a friendship with Robert Downey Jr. that landed him a very funny cameo in Iron Man 3. Though he’s out of work now, having started in the business as a writer, he doesn’t expect that to last long. “If you can write, you never fully feel that daunting kind of emotion of what’s next,” he said. “You can always sit down and make something.”

Pally and Burns in Slow Learners.

Courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival.

A lot of the writing work Pally has done has been uncredited—he met Downey Jr. doing punch-up work for the actor’s various movie projects—but he’s currently working at ABC as part of a development deal that’s aimed as much toward digital projects as any typical network sitcom. Even as a company man, Pally recognizes that his type of comedy—young, sort of weird—isn’t that hot with networks these days. “The young talent that I know, they don’t want to go to networks. Eventually the network will become like a newspaper, kind of fade out, and then there will be a new thing.” He points to shows like High Maintenance—recently picked up by HBO—as an example of the 22-minute-busting future. But for now, on the networks, he predicted the future will look a whole lot like the past: “I think the big trend that you will see is that most of the creators, the people whose shows they are, are older. They are people who have written on Friends, Frasier, Big Bang Theory.”

Which means that, while Pally might not be on a network sitcom again for a while, he and his comedy brethren will be practically everywhere else, from indies like Slow Learners to fly-by appearances on Comedy Bang Bang!. “Comedy’s working all over,” Pally said. “There’s a million more outlets for it.” Next up, Pally will be in a relatively traditional effort, starring opposite Zac Efron and Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa. But even though his old Happy Endings buddies Joe and Anthony Russo are now shepherding three of Marvel’s biggest upcoming movies, making “huge killer action movies with action in them,” Pally said he’s not planning a return to the Marvel world. “There are not a lot of Jewish superheroes.”

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But what about the upcoming Ant-Man star Paul Rudd, who isn’t only Jewish but worked as a bat mitzvah D.J.?

“They gave one Jew a superhero, and they’re like ‘But he’s this big. And he can talk to bugs.’ ”